About the project

The Return on Islamic Religious Education – An Evaluation of the Effects of Islamic Religious Education in Central Java

Islamic religious education in Indonesia, like the other subjects, has an important educational mission in public schools, in that it aims to enable Muslim students to develop a religious orientation in confrontation with their cultural, social origins and the Islamic tradition, and to treat people of other religious or ideological orientations with respect and tolerance. Given this central importance of Islamic religious education for society, the project “the return of Islamic religious education – an evaluation of the effects of Islamic religious education in Central Java” aims to investigate the extent to which Islamic religious education in Central Java’s public schools achieves its educational goals.

The planned research project aims to evaluate Islamic religious education in Central Java based on results obtained through quantitative research. For this purpose, a comparison of the knowledge about and attitudes towards Islam (and other religions) of 12th grade students attending Islamic religious education classes (study group) with the knowledge and attitudes of students attending Islamic religious education classes in a non-Muslim country, using Austria as an example (control group), will be conducted. The two projects are supervised and coordinated by an international team.

By comparing the results of the study and control groups, the effects of Islamic religious education in different contexts can then be elicited. This is possible because the survey also captures instructional, personal, and social indicators that can be used to determine the extent to which variances between the study and control groups are moderated by Islamic religious instruction or caused by other factors.

The project is designed as a cross-sectional study with approximately 50,000 subjects per group.

The following research questions arise for a broad and representative study on the effects of Islamic religious education:

  1. What do students who attend Islamic religious education classes in Central Java know about Islam (and other religions) and what are their attitudes toward Islam (and other religions)?
  2. How are this knowledge and these attitudes conditioned by, on the one hand, what happens in class and, on the other hand, factors external to the class, namely

    • the personal resources of the students,
    • their social resources,
    • their religiosity, and
    • their subjective assessment of their life situation?
  3. How do students who attend Islamic religious education classes in Central Java differ in their religious knowledge and attitudes from the religious knowledge and attitudes of students who attend Islamic religious education classes in the context of a non-Islamic country?
The aim is to elicit the yield of Islamic religious education in Central Java based on the knowledge and attitudes surveyed through questionnaire, which will serve as a basis for its further development.